Healing Art

Gary Demuth @GaryDemuth

Monday

Sep 17, 2018 at 5:23 PMSep 17, 2018 at 5:23 PM

As befitting artwork selected to adorn the walls of the new University of Kansas Schools of Medicine and Nursing Health Education Center, Lindsborg artist A. Mary Kay has created four paintings of the four seasons that symbolize the processes of living and dying.

Kay said she chose to begin with summer, as it is a time of health, growth and optimism. As summer moves into fall and winter, the paintings reflect a movement through time and becomes a metaphor for the seasons of the body, which include aging and death. She ends the four panels with spring as a time of renewal and rebirth.

Kay said she wanted the panels, all mounted in the main lobby of the school building at 138 N. Santa Fe, to "offer the students here in Salina a place of visual meditation on the processes of living and dying."

"The art of painting mimics those of gardening and medicine," she said. "All three require the deep focus of paying very close attention, of submitting one self to responding to the knowledge, questions and observations that arise from listening and observing and recording closely."

Kay was one of six Kansas artists who had their commissioned original work unveiled Saturday during an afternoon open house at the KU Schools of Medicine and Nursing Health Education Center. The open house was hosted by the schools and the SPARK Artist Resource Exchange in Salina.

Each of the exhibited artists were commissioned to create original works for the new building that would reflect the school's mission of training doctors and nurses and encouraging them to serve in rural communities in the state, said Dr. William Cathcart-Rake, dean of the KU School of Medicine in Salina.

The public was invited to tour the new facility, which had its grand opening on June 21, as well as listen to a panel discussion at which the artists talked about their responses to the call for new artwork for the schools and their artistic processes.

Commissioned artists whose work is featured include Kay; Geraldine and Craig and Nelson Smith, also of Lindsborg, who designed a mixed-media work outside second-floor classrooms that focuses on the theme of healing; Dylan Mortimer of Westwood, who installed a collage of brightly-colored cellular formations in the building's community room; Alan Tollakson of Emporia, who created a sculpture of stone and light symbolizing the layered relationships involved in medicine for the second-floor study lounge; and Dierk Van Keppel of Merriam, who installed a glasswork piece at the school's east entrance depicting a sunset and horizon as images of hope.

Additionally, local artists Anne Arkebauer and Carolyn Wedel created a limited edition print for the open house, one of which is displayed in the lobby. Seven large format photographs by Dr. George Jerkovich, a Salina psychiatrist, also are on display.

Cathcart-Rake said the idea for commissioning original artworks for the medical and nursing schools was inspired by the new KU Medical Center Health Education Building in Kansas City, Kan., which installed original art for their own newly-built facility. Cathcart-Rake said he contacted Saralyn Hardy, director of KU's Spencer Museum of Art and former director of the Salina Art Center, who had worked on the Kansas City art project.

"I called her and asked why we couldn't do the same thing here," he said. "She thought it was a great idea."

An invitation for artists to submit proposals was sent out in November, and more than 50 applicants were received, some from as far as New York City and England, Cathcart-Rake said.

A selection committee was formed, and 10 finalists were selected who the committee felt showed the best range of ideas and experience and interest in the mission of the schools. Also taken into consideration, Cathcart-Rake said, was how well the proposed art pieces would fit within the space and architecture of the building.

"Each applicant had a period of time to talk about their vision, and how it related to the medical school," he said. "We ended up with a wide variety of art from glass blowing to classical painting to collage."

Mortimer called his collage "Through the Scars to Stars." In his artist statement, he said the title is a play on the Kansas motto of Ad Astra Per Aspera (Through Difficulty to the Stars) and features a collage of stylized scars representing the actual scars he received following a double lung transplant to treat his cystic fibrosis.

"Between the scars, (I've) created cells illuminated with glitter in a baroque celebration of healing, overcoming difficulty and imagining regeneration and new life," he said.

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